The afternoon wore on and the heap had been
reduced to a foot or so above ground level, when my brush moved over something
curved and hard; perhaps a big stone. I blew away the sand, and saw a grey-white
ridged surface, with flecks of black paint; certainly not a stone. Hilda
leaned over and looked.
"Try getting the stuff away from the front,"
she said. "We ought to get a look at it from another angle, before it's
moved." I came round and began brushing and blowing at the vertical side
of the heap. Down trickled the sand between the harder bits of mud brick, like
tiny yellow waterfalls, and nearer and nearer I came to the side of the buried
object. A final gentle stroke with a brush tip, and the whispering sand slid
away from the surface—and we could see more of the grey and white ridges,
and beneath it a smooth curve of reddish-brown paint. The sand had poured away
below it and left a cavity. "Can you see inside the hollow?" Hilda
asked. I lay down flat and got one eye as close as I could to the rubble.
And then I suddenly saw what the brownish paint
was—part of a small face. I could just see the curved chin and the corner of
a darker painted mouth. Hilda knelt up and beckoned to John, who was not far
away.
"It's the head of a statue, I think," she said
quietly as he joined us. He took a long look, and then sat back on his heels.
His face was very compressed and tense.
"I'll wait while you get it out," was all he
said.
Infinitely slowly we cut back the caked rubble in which
it was embedded. The hardest thing on earth is to go slow when you are
excited. But we had to— we could never tell how strong or how fragile a find
was until it was finally detached from its hiding-place. For all we knew there
might be a crack right across the unseen face, so that the whole thing might
crumble into powder at a clumsy movement.
We widened the cavity just beneath it, so that John could
get his fingers into it in case the head dropped suddenly. He held them here
unmoving for at least five minutes, while we worked round the top. "It's
coming," he said suddenly.
Hilda blew once more at the surface, and the head sank on
to John's hand. He drew it slowly away from the debris. Then very gently he
turned the head over on his palm.
Framed by a dark ceremonial wig, the face of a young girl
gazed up at us with long, beautifully modelled eyes beneath winging dark
eyebrows. The corners of the sweet, full mouth drooped a little. The childish
fullness of the brown cheeks contrasted oddly with the tiny determined pointed
chin. Somehow the sculptor had caught the pathetic dignity of youth burdened
with royalty. The little head was another exquisite example of the genius of
the sculptors of Ak-henaten's day for perceiving more than the surface truth,
and expressing to perfection what they had seen.
I looked up from the head to John's face. In those few
moments it had completely lost its gaunt grey look of the past few weeks. He
knelt mere in the dust, brown and radiant, looking down at the beautiful thing
on his hand.
"Now," he said slowly, "our season has
been crowned." It was only now that I knew the true exhilaration that
comes from literally unearthing a treasure which in one flash eliminates time;
when the ancient artist speaks direct through his creation to all those coming
after, who understand his language.
I thought ... of the Central School, and of my own
tentative dabbing at clay and chipping at stone. I knew well the difference
between average talent and the work of a master when I saw it. I felt very
humble. Yet I think my own struggles in the same craft gave me a special
insight into the skill of that long dead artist. I'd tried so hard myself to
express in clay and stone the living bone formation beneath the softness of
flesh and muscle. I knew from my own experience how much observation, how much
sensitivity, how much skill must be there to carve a head which convinces that
bones really lie beneath the surface, the unseen strength and framework of the
whole. It's easy enough to produce a superficial mask, a slick portrait with
nothing behind it. And I knew, too, that even when a craftsman had gained that
degree of excellence, the creative work of a true artist might still be beyond
him. That ultimate gift—the mysterious gift of expressing the metaphysical
in inanimate clay or stone—lies somewhere in the depths of the artist
himself, and can neither be imparted nor learned. But here in my hand lay the
flowering of both skills—and looking down at die small head, I, a
student-apprentice, saluted my unknown artist-craftsman, dead these three
thousand years and more.
The wonder of touching something that had lain buried and
unmoving for so long came over me again, just as I'd felt when I was new to
all this, four months ago. But I'd found that to say: "This was made
three thousand years ago" now hardly stirred my sense of time at all. But
I thought of it this way: the little head, wedged in that rubble, up against a
ruined wall in this silent, sunny place in Egypt, had been lying there, face
downwards, while Troy was burning; while Sennacherib was ransacking the cities
beyond his borders; on through the slow centuries, while the greatness of
Athens came and went, and while Christ lived out his days on earth. It was
still lying there when the Romans first marched on London, when Harold fell at
Hastings, and the last Plantagenet at Bosworth Field. On and on through the
years, until this hot afternoon when the brush and knife came nearer and
nearer to it through the yielding rubble, until it stirred, dropped, and lay
once again in a warm human hand.
